Texas singer aims to win back House — and Latinos sorry they voted for Trump — one quinceañera at a time

Not every candidate for Congress would be welcome at a quinceañera. Then again, most candidates are not Bobby Pulido, the Latin Grammy-winning Tejano singer.

Shortly after Pulido won his primary to be the Democratic nominee for Texas’s 15th district, his Republican opponent–Rep. Monica De La Cruz–said that “This election isn’t about who you want performing at your niece’s quinceañera,” a reference to celebration common in Hispanic Catholic families for a girl’’s 15th birthday.

Instead, Pulido pivoted and sent out an open invitation to perform at quinceañeras throughout the district that encompasses the Texas-Mexico border.

“My schedule on weekends is crazy now, with quinceañeras, we've averaged, two, sometimes three a night,” he told The Independent in April over the phone. On top of that, he’s been invited to a 90-year-old’s birthday party and a quinceañera, the male equivalent.

But novelty aside, Pulido’s star power and his willingness to use it for his campaign might be the thing that helps Democrats win back the House of Representatives, and more importantly, Hispanic voters.

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Much of the attention when it comes to Texas has been on the marquee Senate race pitting incumbent Sen. John Cornyn and MAGA Attorney General Ken Paxton. But Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico cannot win if Democrats don’t run up the margins with Hispanic voters, who make up 80 percent of the district.

And Pulido thinks that he can win back Hispanic voters — after a brief flirtation with Donald Trump in 2024 — back into the Democratic coalition.

“I think people right now are very disappointed with this administration, there's a lot of buyer's remorse, because people are still seeing what it really means,” Pulido told The Independent.

Pulido’s popularity might be the thing that helps him. Like the namesake people in the genre, Tejano music is almost exclusively sung in Spanish. While it includes elements of mariachi music, it includes of blues and polka, a remnant of the German influence in Texas. Pulido has won the Latin Grammy for best Tejano album on two occasions.

Still, he’s had a hankering for politics ever since he studied political science at St. Mary’s University before he quit to pursue his singing career.

“And I reached a point in my career that I said, ‘you know, I want to try to help my people and represent them,’” he said.

Democrats’ problem with Hispanic voters could not be understated. Despite Trump’s verbal assaults on Mexican-Americans and policy of family separation in his first term, he actually made gains with Hispanic voters in 2020.

This was especially true in the Rio Grande Valley, the area that borders Mexico where a majority of the residents are Hispanic or Tejano, the descendants of the original Spanish-speaking settlers in Texas. Then in 2024, Trump improved his margins with Hispanics and flipped the Rio Grande Valley.

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“So it's in our DNA to try to do better than our parents did,” Pulido said. “And a lot of times I think the Democratic Party, first of all, kind of took us for granted.”

In 2022, after the redistricting that happens every ten years due to the Census,

By contrast, Pulido said that Republicans told Hispanic voters that if they chose the GOP, their lives would become more affordable.

“People are starting to kind of realize that, okay, there's a lot of things that they have done down here that have just shown that it's anti Latino,” he said. Specifically, he pointed to how the Trump administration has targeted money meant for Hispanic-serving institutions. He said that many small-business owners cannot field a workforce because of the deportations.

But Democrats feel confident in Pulido. On Monday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee named him as one of eight candidates it would back as part of its “Red to Blue” program.

At the same time, Democrats still have plenty of work to do with Hispanic voters. Despite the fact that they made significant gains in Virginia and New Jersey’s gubernatorial race, only 38 percent of Hispanics would vote for a generic Democrat for Congress compared to 36 percent who would vote for a generic Republican if the midterm election were held today, according to an Economist/YouGov poll released this week.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer than with immigration. While many Hispanics overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump’s job performance on immigration, many Hispanics overwhelmingly disapproved of the spike in immigration that happened during the lax border policies of the Biden administration.

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And many Hispanics work for institutions like Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection. Some Democrats have repeated the phrase that ICE must be dismantled.

But Pulido said there is a middle way that many would approve of.

“We don't like a free for all. I mean, nobody's saying, open the gates and let everybody come in,” he said. “But at the end of the day, you have to treat people with dignity. A lot of the people here, including many Border Patrol agents, I might add, their grandparents came here illegally.”

Pulido also said that the Trump administration’s attempt to kill birthright citizenship would throw many American families into chaos.

“I could tell you that probably over half of the people in the Rio Grande Valley at some point in their lives are American citizens because of birthright citizenship,” he said.

Many point out how Latino voters primarily vote on the economy, which helped Trump due to high prices. The median income in the 15th district is $62,554, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, far lower than the $83,730 nationally.

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But Pulido said that the two are interconnected in the valley.

“So right now that's going to change a lot of voter sentiment because small businesses relied on people from Mexico coming and bringing their tourist dollars here. That's no longer working right now.”

Democrats are hoping this might help them turn around their fortunes with Hispanic voters. During the primary, Pulido campaigned with Talarico, who beat Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic primary partially thanks to Talarico’s strength with Hispanic voters.

“He's, you know, obviously running his race, and I'm running mine and and I backed him up,” he said. “I want him to win. I really think he's got what it takes, but I'm sure at some point we'll probably get together.”

For the time being Pulido will continue campaigning, including at quinceañeras.

“I love it, because these are people that are new people that you, in a normal situation in a campaign, you're not going to be in front of,” he said.

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